Zarby Kakar of Shoreline was born in Afghanistan and came to the United States as a child fleeing the war with the Soviet Union.

Zarby Kakar of Shoreline was born in Afghanistan and came to the United States as a child fleeing the war with the Soviet Union.

Photo: Renee C. Byer/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Altered Lives: 'Our nightmares are following us here'

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(EDITOR'S NOTE: Part of an occasional Seattle P-I series.)

The morning of Sept. 11, Zarby Kakar's sleep was broken by an urgent call from a friend, telling her something dreadful had happened. She rushed downstairs and turned on the television, watching the news coverage through one hastily inserted contact lens.

As the photos of suspected hijackers flashed on the screen, the North Seattle mom knew life would be more difficult for Muslims across the country.

With the mention of Osama bin Laden, she knew the United States would bring more bloodshed to her war-ravaged homeland -- Afghanistan.

In her living room, Kakar dropped to her knees.

"Our nightmares from Afghanistan are following us here," she cried.

Since that day, nearly every aspect of Kakar's life has been affected. As an American Muslim, she's experienced the dirty looks provoked by her head scarf, or hijab. As a mother, she desperately wants to protect her 8-year-old daughter. As a native Afghan, she fears for family members thousands of miles away who are scrambling to survive.

Long before the bombing raids began, Kakar, 26, knew the United States would attack. She prayed that her five sisters and two brothers would make it out of the country before the real fighting started.

They didn't.

The last Kakar heard, some relatives tried unsuccessfully to escape into Pakistan; others fled to the countryside.

Telephone service in Afghanistan was one of the first casualties. Kakar can do little but hope for word that her family is safe. Once a week, she calls a brother in Pakistan, a doctor who works in refugee camps for the United Nations. He tells her the bad news: Their siblings haven't shown up yet.

"We don't know anything," says Kakar, her hands clenched in her lap. "It's the waiting that just tires you out."

The cities her relatives call home have become frighteningly familiar in news reports: Mazar-e-Sharif, Maymaneh, Kandahar. Cities where people have been dying.

"The people who get hurt are the Afghan people," Kakar says. "I believe my people have suffered enough. They don't need this. ... They're humans. How much can they take?"

Kakar is a slender woman with striking, large eyes, whose tasteful silk head scarves complement her tailored jackets. She is passionate about the equality women are entitled to under Islam and isn't one to sit quietly in the corner when she sees an injustice. She acknowledges with a laugh that in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, her outspokenness would have gotten her tongue cut out by now.

Kakar is the youngest of 14 children -- 10 from Kakar's mother, the rest from her father's other two wives.

She was a young child in Gourzawan, a village outside Maymaneh, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979. She remembers being told to hide in the river and tunnels when the warplanes came. Kakar was 5 years old when she left the country with her mother, whose health was failing.

Together, they ended up in Seattle 16 years ago.

Like so many people, Kakar spent Sept. 12 straining her ears in the quiet that cloaked America after aircraft were grounded. When she did finally hear a plane, tortured childhood memories suddenly returned.

"It was the first time, after 16 years, that feeling came back: Do I have to hide again from the planes?"

Family held government posts

The Kakars were an influential Pashtun family of landholders who held top posts in the government of Muhammad Zahir Shahin, the king overthrown in 1973.

When war forced the closure of schools in Afghanistan, the family could afford to send the boys abroad, to Pakistan or the United States, to complete their education.

That was before the Northern Alliance seized control in the early '90s. The family's land was stripped from them, and it wasn't until the largely Pashtun Taliban came into power in 1996 that Kakar's family got it back. Although she doesn't support the Taliban's treatment of women or its ultraconservative interpretation of Islam, Kakar's family was protected. Now, the Northern Alliance is on the cusp of seizing power, and she fears the retribution they may wreak.

"To me, the Northern Alliance and the Taliban are like one monster with two heads," she says.

For several weeks after the terrorist attacks, Kakar watched television all day, then had nightmares at night. A doctor she knows gave her part-time work as a medical assistant, telling her, "You have to get out of the house."

She rarely watches television and doesn't read the newspaper, coping by putting thoughts of her family and the people of Afghanistan out of her mind as much as she can.

"I just try to take myself out of it, so that I don't think about it," she says.

Mosque is her refuge

The Idriss Mosque in Northgate is Kakar's refuge -- especially in the turmoil of the past few months.

It's a place where she can talk with other Muslim women about the fear they all face. Before Ramadan began Nov. 16, Kakar met every Friday night with a women's group.

About 30 women gather at the mosque to discuss the Muslim faith, women's issues and family issues. Since the bombing of Afghanistan began, the group has made special prayers for their Muslim sisters and brothers in that country.

The prayers brought Kakar both comfort and sadness, says Azizeh Farajallah, a member of the group.

"I've seen it in her face more than once," Farajallah says. "I would actually see the sadness in her face."

On a recent weekend, the women sat on a rug-covered floor in the mosque's basement. White strips of butcher paper served as makeshift tablecloths. As they passed around pizza and plates piled high with rice and chicken, Kakar talked with a woman who is also from Afghanistan.

"When they went to war with Iraq, did they kill Saddam?" Kakar asked. "No. Have they killed Osama? Not that I know of. They're killing innocent Afghani people."

All the women at the mosque have shared the fear of being visibly Muslim in post-Sept. 11 America.

Kakar has been subjected to dirty looks, rather than more-overt harassment. But the mosque she belongs to was attacked Sept. 13 by a man who doused a worshipper's car with gasoline in an apparent arson attempt, then fired a gun before fleeing. The suspect currently is facing federal hate-crime charges.

Outside the mosque, Kakar finds herself taking pains to smile at strangers to demonstrate that she's not to be feared. It's an uneasy, defensive posture.

"Am I smiling for these people," she asks, "or am I smiling because I have to?"

Kakar's daughter, Zainab, has stopped wearing the hijab outside of the mosque and is asking questions Kakar finds hard to answer. Questions such as: "Are they going to kill all the children in Afghanistan?"

Zainab is afraid that if the kids at school find out where her family comes from, they'll hate her.

Her mother is worried that the crackdown on terrorism and changes in the law for homeland defense could mean she will be forced to leave this country.

Although she's a U.S. citizen, the news she hears troubles her: the hundreds of people of Middle Eastern descent being detained; the raid Nov. 7 on a money-transfer operation in South Seattle that federal authorities have tied to bin Laden's terrorist network.

Could Kakar -- who has been wiring money to relatives in Pakistan -- get caught in a similar dragnet?

She's lived here long enough to embrace the United States as a second "family." This is where she went to school and where she studied Islam. But she's afraid the devastation created by the fighting in Afghanistan will turn her against her adoptive home.

"I'm afraid that watching this ... that I might grow some hate toward the American people," she says. "I'm afraid of that."